On 27 Feb, 2013, at 10:06, Maciej Fijalkowski <fij...@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Wed, Feb 27, 2013 at 9:29 AM, Ronald Oussoren <ronaldousso...@mac.com> > wrote: >> >> On 26 Feb, 2013, at 16:13, Maciej Fijalkowski <fij...@gmail.com> wrote: >> >>> Hello. >>> >>> I would like to discuss on the language summit a potential inclusion >>> of cffi[1] into stdlib. >> >> The API in general looks nice, but I do have some concens w.r.t. including >> cffi in the stdlib. >> >> 1. Why is cffi completely separate from ctypes, instead of layered on top of >> it? That is, add a utility module to ctypes that can parse C declarations >> and generate the right ctypes definitions. > > Because ctypes API is a mess and magic. We needed a cleaner (and much > smaller) model. The major advantages of starting over is probably that you can hide the complexity and that opens opportunities for optimizations. That said, I'm not convinced that ctypes is unnecessarily complex. > >> >> 2. Cffi has a dependencies on pycparser and that module and its dependencies >> would therefore also be added to the stdlib (even if they'd be hidden in the >> cffi package) > > Yes. pycparser and ply. Which aren't part of the stdlib right now. > >> >> 3. Cffi basicly contains a (limited) C parser, and those are notoriously >> hard to get exactly right. Luckily cffi only needs to interpret declarations >> and not the full language, but even so this can be a risk of subtle bugs. > > It seems to work. That's not a confidency inspiring comment :-). That said, I use a hacked up fork of pycparser to parse Apple's Cocoa headers for PyObjC and it appears to work fine for that. > >> >> 4. And finally a technical concern: how well does cffi work with fat >> binaries on OSX? In particular, will the distutils support generate cached >> data for all architectures supported by a fat binary? > > no idea. That's somehting that will have to be resolved before cffi can be included in the stdlib, fat binaries are supported by CPython and are used the binary installers. Ronald _______________________________________________ Python-Dev mailing list Python-Dev@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-dev Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-dev/archive%40mail-archive.com
